I am running Ubuntu Gutsy 64 bit on an hp pavillion zv6000, amd 64, 2gb ram, dual booting xp and ubuntu (xp is in the first partition/half of the hd and ubuntu is in the second partition). my distro was working fine until yesterday, when i booted up ubuntu. grub came up, i picked ubuntu (normal), and it started to boot, but no gui (just a blank screen). it ran for about 5 minutes, with about a full minute with a solid 'hard drive reading' light. i don't know what it was doing w/o any output. then it rebooted, showed the hp logo boot screen, and came up with grub. i picked ubuntu again, and after another 5 minutes GDM shows up. i have lots of ram and a fast processor, and i've seen gutsy 64 run like a charm on a dell amd 64, so i don't know what i'm missing... what logs can i check to see what it is doing at startup? what can i do to get ubuntu to load right?

additional info:
- i booted in recovery mode, and it displayed all output... it got to a terminal ok
- i am going to try re-installing grub, but i don't think it's grub because i can boot into windows xp fine

Hi charlesreid1,


If you can get single user mode working fine, that means your grub is all OK!

There is no need to reinstall your machine.
Just go to single user mode and check if you have got some line like this:

in one of your init scripts such as /etc/rc.d/rc.local and so on

Also check the contents of
/etc/inittab
If you have anything like this:
id:6:initdefault:
change it to
id:3:initdefault:
3 or 5 or whatever other runlevel that you want except 6(restart) 0(halt).




Regards,

Aniruddha

Success!

I logged into single-user mode by adding the parameter "Single" to the kernel runline in grub, and everything worked OK. However, I had no luck in finding anything like you described in the following init scripts:

/etc/rc.local
/etc/init.d
/etc/event.d (equivalent of /etc/inittab)


So, I edited my /boot/grub/menu.lst and saw the kernel parameter "quiet", and after I got rid of it, my laptop displayed everything it was doing and booted right into ubuntu (~30 seconds total). I'm not really sure what it was doing during the 5-minute boot-ups, but at least now that the "quiet" parameter is gone if it starts doing it again I will be able to see what it's doing and troubleshoot it better.


Thanks for your help & quick response!

I had this happen at one time too on an HP Pavilion zv6000. It turns out that every 40 reboots a hard drive check is forced, which takes several minutes, but the display does not show anything unless you choose "recovery mode" from the grub menu. This can happen at the most inopportune times. I had people waiting for me and I could not figure out why my laptop was taking so long to power up.

The occasional s-l-o-w boot is due to fsck being run after N reboots. N is configurable with tune2fs. See man tune2fs for the full story.

As you have discovered, you can set your grub's menu.lst so you see the startup messages scroll past on your screen. Mine occasionally says something like "hda6 has been remounted 30 times without a fsck. fsck forced now". Then there's a progress bar. It is boring, but probably a good idea for data integrity.